Differences among NTSC, PAL and SECAM

Video on a DVD is stored in digital format, but it’s formatted for one of two mutually incompatible television systems: 525/60 (NTSC) or 625/50 (PAL/SECAM). Therefore, there are two kinds of DVDs: “NTSC DVDs” and “PAL DVDs.” Some players only play NTSC discs, others play PAL and NTSC discs. Discs are also coded for different regions of the world. NTSC is the TV format used in Canada, Japan, Mexico, Philippines, Taiwan, United States, and other countries. PAL is the TV format used in most of Europe, most of Africa, China, India, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, North Korea, and other countries.

Almost all DVD players sold in PAL countries play both kinds of discs. These multi-standard
players partially convert NTSC to a 60-Hz PAL (4.43 NTSC) signal. The player uses the PAL 4.43-MHz color subcarrier encoding format but keeps the 525/60 NTSC scanning rate. Most modern PAL TVs can handle this “pseudo-PAL” signal. A few multi-standard PAL players output true 3.58 NTSC from NTSC discs, which requires an NTSC TV or a multi-standard TV. Some players have a switch to choose 60-Hz PAL or true NTSC output when playing NTSC discs.

There are a few standards-converting PAL players that convert from an NTSC disc to standard PAL output for older PAL TVs. Proper “on the fly” standards conversion requires expensive hardware to handle scaling, temporal conversion, and object motion analysis. Because the quality of conversion in DVD players is poor, using 60-Hz PAL output with a compatible TV provides a better picture than converting from NTSC to PAL. (Sound is not affected by video conversion.)

Most NTSC players can’t play PAL discs, and most NTSC TVs don’t work with PAL video. A very small number of NTSC players (such as Apex and SMC) can convert PAL to NTSC. External converter boxes are also available, such as the Emerson EVC1595 ($350). High-quality converters are available from companies such as TenLab and Snell and Wilcox.

The latest software tools such as Adobe After Effects and Canopus ProCoder do quite a good job of converting between PAL and NTSC at low cost, but they are only appropriate for the production environment (converting the video before it is encoded and put on the DVD). See Snell and Wilcox’s The Engineer’s Guide to Standards Conversion and The Engineer’s Guide to Motion Compensation for technical details of conversion.

There are three differences between discs intended for playback on different TV systems: picture dimensions and pixel aspect ratio (720×480 vs. 720×576), display frame rate (29.97vs. 25), and surround audio options (Dolby Digital vs. MPEG audio). Video from film is usually encoded at 24 frames/sec but is preformatted for one of the two required display rates. Movies formatted for PAL display are usually sped up by 4% at playback, so the audio must be adjusted accordingly before being encoded. All PAL DVD players can play Dolby Digital audio tracks, but not all NTSC players can play MPEG audio tracks. PAL and SECAM share the same scanning format, so discs are the same for both systems. The only difference is that SECAM players output the color signal in the format required by SECAM TVs. Note that modern TVs in most SECAM countries can also read PAL signals, so you can use a player that only has PAL output. The only case in which you need a player with SECAM output is for older SECAM-only TVs.

A producer can choose to put 525/60 NTSC video on one side of the disc and 625/50 PAL on the other. Most studios put Dolby Digital audio tracks on their PAL discs instead of MPEG audio tracks.

Because of PAL’s higher resolution, the video usually takes more space on the disc than the NTSC version.